"A drawing of a person is not a real person but a drawing of a line is a real line."
-- Sol LeWitt
Compare these two drawings of a Dutch sky:
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| Rembrandt |
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| Franklin Booth |
In nature the sky has no black lines (or any lines at all, apart from the outlines of clouds) so both artists are taking liberties when conveying sky with a tool that only makes black lines. How have they used that liberty?
Booth uses a series of uniform, closely drawn parallel lines of constant width, to create a gray tone:
Rembrandt, on the other hand, uses line in a much more free form way because, well, he's Rembrandt:
The manual labor behind Booth's drawing is impressive, but the ratio of work to creative choices is less impressive. Some of his work would later become the work of zipatone.
Rembrandt's lines, on the other hand, shape and radiate and sculpt; note that when Rembrandt does use straight lines (in the upper left corner) they are neither as parallel nor as uniform as Booth's lines. Rather than add mere tone Rembrandt's lines add power; whether beams of light or driving rain, they shape the image and give it vertebrae.
We are witnessing two different types of control. The constancy of Booth's lines, before the era of micron pens, displays one type of control. Note how Booth even attempts to join the unavoidable breaks in his lines:
Here's another example of Booth's sutures in the sky:
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These breaks aren't created intentionally to describe some phenomenon in the sky, or for abstract expressive purposes. They are a necessary limitation of his technique due to the the limits of human wrist movement. Note that Booth's sutures pervade his drawing; they are in the grass, and on his human figures as well, but they matter less if the purpose of all those lines is just for tonal effect: |
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| Booth |
Rembrandt's brand of control was very different. I don't know if Rembrandt was drawing from his wrist, his elbow or his toes but you see no such sutures in his drawing. His lines drag and loop around with great freedom.
With each new line, Booth only had to ask himself: "Is this line the exact same width and distance as the ten lines that preceded it?" With each new line, Rembrandt had to ask himself: "Is this line the right shape, length, design and location to depict a sky that has no black lines in it? Where I'm cross hatching am I creating pockets of density and light, control and freedom in the 'right' places?" These are harder choices than Booth's. The answers require more artistic courage. The payoff is greater.
Lots of other artists use thousands of lines to create tone with varying results. When using that technique, each individual line carries less weight and becomes less important. The economists call this "diminishing marginal utility." Drew Friedman and Virgil Finlay use stippling. Cober, Tinkelman and many others use cross-hatching. Wrightson, Norman Lindsay, Frazetta, Foster and others often used repetitive fine lines to show shading or volume. Sometimes these techniques can be employed to stunning effect. Sometimes not.
To return to where we started, it is in the nature of drawing that every single drawing must take liberties in order to translate reality into line. As Sol LeWitt noted, a drawing of a person is not a real person. The question is, how does an artist make best use of those liberties? My personal taste is to give most credit to artists who are always conscious that "a drawing of a line is a real line," and I'll be posting some examples of that.
26 comments:
a drawing of a line is a real line,
That's a tautological line of argument...
The writing of a word is the real word...
With painting/drawing the handwriting is the formation of its plastic words and its sentences are the relations between what is being written.
"A drawing of a person is not a real person but a drawing of a line is a real line."
Boy that quote is annoying. I don’t know anyone who has seen a line drawing of a person who has mistaken the drawing for a “real person.” Modernism has created some pretty silly myths/ideas about the past so they can appear profound. Remember a line has length but no thickness or breadth so you really can’t draw a line;). Since ancient times men have known this. Lines do not exist in the world of immediate experience but only by the act of our imagination have we conceived them as distinct representations to communicate our experience and ideas about the forms of life. No one draws a line for it’s own sake.
Booth was no Rembrandt, but his work is still pretty nice.
Friedman gave up stippling and switched to painting in the 90s. He retains his caricaturing ability, but his initial appeal to me was how his stippled ink dots resembled high contrast, black-and-white flashbulb photography rendered on newsprint, perfect for his paparazzi-like celebrity caricatures. I remember an interview he gave where he said he gave it up because it was so labor intensive and the tap-tap-tapping from his home studio would sound insane to visitors.
I agree with Donald. Booth does some pretty nice work and It's hard to be put up against Rembrandt. LOL!
Booth does a nice job of moving your eye around his compositions, you can almost feel the air circulating through the pictures. It may have something to do with his "sutures," which are like slightly but constantly changing vectors that flow around the picture space while managing the scale and proportion of that space really well.
Defending LeWitt's statement, I don't think it has anything to do with other artists or viewers mistaking drawings of people for "real" people. It is an exploration of the vexed and strange nature of abstraction, which to some proponents is about letting the use of the artistic medium be what it, materially or formally, is. A line is a line, a square is a square, a splotch of green is just that.
Of course, this anti-representational account -- collapsing the distinction between the thing you draw and the drawing itself, the signified and the signifies -- has its own brick walls. Does it make sense, for example, to talk about the drawing of a line as a "drawing" (or a "drawing of something") per se. Perhaps "making a line" would be more exact, to the extent that we don't think of a drawing of a line as possibly representing or working to capture something out there called "a line."
Steinberg's work constantly played with and excavated this conceptual gap:
Take, for example,"The Line":
https://saulsteinbergfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/110.-TRIENNALE-THE-LINE-C-031A-031B-031C-cropped_edited-1.jpg
I’m fascinated by lines and I’m curious to see next images.
In my opinion, there are different approach here :
- Rembrandt tries to recreate an impression, with a very subjective rendering.
- Booth creates an image. It’s a very constructed image with "artificial" mechanic lines. The fascination comes from this very controlled technique. It’s artificial but it’s about trees and Pan.
chris bennett wrote: "That's a tautological line of argument."
Is it? A line is always a line, but that's only one of its roles (and its most recent one in the history of art). For most of history, a line stood for something else. It was a symbol, not the thing itself. Whether it was highly realistic or idealized or the Platonic form of the thing, it was still not the thing.
LeWitt is talking about a line in the ontological sense. In one way, that line was there, hidden all along. In another sense it was only revealed with art for art's sake.
Tom wrote: "a line has length but no thickness or breadth so you really can’t draw a line;). Since ancient times men have known this. Lines do not exist in the world of immediate experience"
You're talking about a geometric line, which by definition has only one dimension. The types of lines I've been proselytizing have plenty of thickness or breadth.
Tom also wrote: "No one draws a line for it’s own sake." Have you met Cy Twombly or Richard Serra or a hundred other recent artists?
Donald Pittenger-- I agree, Booth has a lot of commend him. So do Norman Lindsay, Frank Frazetta and a batch of other artists who have used similar techniques. How much of what we admire is the level of effort and the manual dexterity (as opposed to the sensitivity and the insight and the ambition of the line)?
Booth could be quite Rembrandty if he wished...
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
In order to prove that Booth’s created "breaks" in his lines as a "necessary limitation of his technique due to the the limits of human wrist movement," you’d need to prove he couldn’t draw really long lines that look uninterrupted or smooth. But of course, he could do exactly that.
Booth could've used a "Ruling Pen" with a ruler or stiff curve/french curve any time he wanted to create the longest lines he needed.
As well, to support your theory it would need to be the case that the "breaks" in Booth's lines would have only appeared after lengthy lines in large visual areas and not in small areas where it would be easy to create the short lines. But that doesn't happen. They appear in both large areas and small, as you yourself observed.
As well, sometimes they don't much appear at all.
So it was not a matter of the wrist being incapable. Rather (actually) Booth was indeed doing it on purpose.
Anonymous-- I agree that, like Booth, Friedman has some things to commend him (although the stippling technique--doing it or listening to it-- would drive me balmy). So does Will Elder, who used stippling. I'm less fond of Virgil Finlay's stippling. But one thing about the stippling technique is that it's never very bold. Drawing one dot at a time is marginal, incremental work. You can never go too far wrong; if you misplace a dot relative to its neighbors, you can white it out or add another.
Tom-- I agree, I shouldn't (and don't) expect anyone to compete with Rembrandt. He was just an excellent example of the point I wanted to make. Besides, he and Booth both just happened to draw a Dutch landscape with a windmill under a great big sky, for comparison purposes. (Did you note the tiny windmill in the background of Rembrandt's picture?)
Peter-- You were a step ahead of me, I planned to uses that Steinberg drawing, "line" in this series. I love that drawing. By leading the line through a variety of identities, Steinberg shows us how easy it is to detach a line from its content, and challenges us to regard the line as a drawing of a line.
You ask, "Does it make sense, for example, to talk about the drawing of a line as a "drawing" (or a "drawing of something") per se." Whether you use "drawing" as a verb or a noun, my answer is "yes." A completely abstract line could have all of the qualities we look for in a classical drawing except "likeness."
As I mentioned last time out, and as Tom mentioned above, Booth is most often using his directional 'patches' to express the air. Not only air direction/flow, but also turbulence.
It is easier to see this effect when you compare Booth's docile skies to his blustery, windswept images.
Docile sky 1.
Docile Sky 2.
Docile Sky (via ruling pen.)
Blustery sky, day.
Blustery sky, night.
A line is always a line, but that's only one of its roles (and its most recent one in the history of art). For most of history, a line stood for something else. It was a symbol, not the thing itself. Whether it was highly realistic or idealized or the Platonic form of the thing, it was still not the thing.
David, a line on its own is just a line. A colour on its own is just a colour. A musical note on its own is just a musical note. None of them, on their own, stand for something else. It is only the relationships between these elements that can mean something, that can 'stand for something else'.
A brick is just a brick, but many bricks can become a wall, and many walls can become a house. But regarding meaningful authorship; a house is not a home unless someone lives there.
"A drawing of a person is not a real person but a drawing of a line is a real line."
Every communication is significant. One cannot communicate without signifying.
Every intentional mark a being makes (or leaves behind) is a communication, even the simplest abstraction, in both senses of that word; original and modernist-essentialist.
There is nothing to signification but either indexical, symbolic, or iconic representation.
Thus communication is nothing but representation, broadly speaking.
Thus there is no such thing as a 'real line' or "completely abstract (sic) line" in the Modernist Non-Representationalist sense. To the extent the line exists it signifies. Communicative line-ness and linear signification are the same thing.
Li-An wrote: "The fascination comes from this very controlled technique."
I agree. Booth's subjects are often grand and heroic, and his style is appealing, but ultimately it's the "controlled technique" that fascinates. Not the subtlety or sophistication of his line, not its wisdom nor its variety nor its liveliness nor its passion nor its insight nor its playfulness nor its inventiveness. Its control. But I admit, its control is very impressive.
Kev Ferrara-- I'd say your examples of Booth's work are "Rembrandty" in subject matter but I think Booth's line remains stolid in comparison to Rembrandt's. I'd never confuse these for Rembrandts, but if you think they're similar I'd happily trade my Booths for your Rembrandts.
As for the breaks in Booth's lines, perhaps he recognized that his technical drawings made with a T square and rapidograph look sad and lifeless, so he was willing to tolerate the imprecision and unavoidable breaks in the lines drawn by hand. If that was his trade off, it was a wise one. But for me, that still means the breaks were a byproduct of the anatomy of the wrist. There is no other justification for those disconnects in the lines in the sky. They aren't clouds or lightning bolts or other heavenly objects, they are at best designs made necessary by flawed efforts to create uniform tone (something Rembrandt would've recognized as a waste of time). Booth did try to minimize them by making the lines meet when he could, but the match was never perfect and sometimes he just gave up and connected them orthogonally.
That's not a crime, it's just a weaker way of drawing the sky than Rembrandt's.
Ultimately it's the "controlled technique" that fascinates. Not the subtlety or sophistication of his line, not its wisdom nor its variety nor its liveliness nor its passion nor its insight nor its playfulness nor its inventiveness. Its control. But I admit, its control is very impressive.
Booth is using his lines in groups, not as singular actors. They unite to function like a painter's brights and flats.
To judge them as singular actors is like criticizing a particular pawn's lack of rank advancement in an otherwise winning chess game; a critique based not on the point of the whole business (to win the grand game, to make a work of art), but on a minor fixation that promotes ancillary (or even pet) artistic interests ahead of primary artistic goals.
Despite your opinions/assertions (bolded above), it is obvious Booth's technical control is at the service of his narrative, artistic and compositional ideas, and poetic sensibility. He didn't 'jazz up' his lines with tactical noodling. He was a strategic composer. He was more concerned with writing and scoring the music than jamming in a club. (But, of course, his drawing performances were superlative as well. Quite refined.)
I think it is safe to say that nobody would care about Booth's beautiful and dreamy work if he was simply and solely a technician. It is his artistic soul that makes his work so fascinating. That he worked diligently and neatly to achieve his visions is hardly a mark against him.
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I really like Rembrandt's clouds in the etching you've posted. They have a beautiful roiling movement, grandeur, and suggestiveness to them. The ultra thin etching lines are fun to compare to Booth's more graphic pen lines. (Viva la difference!)
I don't think the rest of the picture is up to his best work. The diagonal rain lines are robotic and unbalanced and the stylizations of the trees feel dated to me. Those clouds however feel like they will be beautiful forever.
Just to add a little to Tom and Kev's points on hatching temperaments:
The limitations of the body define the body, so its attempt to draw a perfect line or circle will reflect its presence by way of imperfect embodiment.
Thus the cool hatchings of Booth and the quiet paint surfaces of Vermeer with their subtle bodily tremulousness in trying to describe the reposeful ideal will thereby be a component in expressing their yearning for it. The drama is caught in the reticence.
Rembrandt on the other hand dances his surfaces. The drama is caught in release.
Peter wrote
"It is an exploration of the vexed and strange nature of abstraction, which to some proponents is about letting the use of the artistic medium be what it, materially or formally, is. A line is a line, a square is a square, a splotch of green is just that."
There is really nothing strange or vexed about it, people have been making and looking at pictures since the beginning of time. All communication depends upon analogy. Inevitable one describes their understanding of one thing in terms of something else by using the word "like," because it is impossible to communicate anything about the nature of reality without some sort of intermediary.
Everything is, "being what it is." Leave the paint in the tube if you want artistic mediums to be what they are. You can look at line as an abstraction that is found in "all," drawings, just like "words," are found in all poems but it is not the same as seeing the relationship of the number four to a square. The whole point of seeing abstractions is so the interested individual can better understand and see the relations between what appears the separate things of the universe. Abstraction is a principal of organizing, and geometry is the investigation into that abstraction.
Even in the Steinberg drawing, his line is communicating, he doesn’t seem to be investigating the “abstract,” nature of line. As one can see from his drawing his line simultaneously creates ground plane to support the “points,” of interest of the story of his travels from Venice to Egypt. The plane becomes the unifying element that gives the understood orientation of all the objects. The story “line” has become a visible “line” that leads the to a fun an pleasant picture. It’s nothing new and it doesn’t need to be something new. As far as "excavating some conceptual gap," one can really only shrug my shoulders.
David wrote
"You're talking about a geometric line, which by definition has only one dimension. The types of lines I've been proselytizing have plenty of thickness or breadth."
A line in geometry has no dimension only length. But that wasn't my point. My point was how much more profound and really radical the geometrical insight is compared to Sol Lewitt's art school comment. I might take the quote more seriously if he could draw like Rembrandt but there is no proof he had such understanding. Funny you never hear an artist like Rembrandt making such silly observations. People who can't do anything with the medium are always the ones in art school that want to explore the medium's nature.
When drawing a line what one is really drawing is a plane, that is parallel lines, which is the measured of the width and depth of the of the drawing point itself. :)
"the types of lines I've been proselytizing have plenty of thickness or breadth."
Now that portrait of Albert Drone is only 4 inches high. I can't imagine the lines are that thick.:)
The real powerful lines are the ones you don't see, the scaffolding so to speak, the construction lines that maintain and create the relations of all the parts of the picture. Which makes the drawing of the windmill in Rembrandt's etching possible. Thanks for pointing it out!
Which brings me to the wrist comment. A comment that sounds like it was made by some one who hasn't drawn very much. Let's see what Michelangelo has to say, "A man paints with his brains not with his hands."
Or to put it another way " What is conceived well is expressed clearly." Nicholas Boileau
The reason for the line is the thought or intuition or feeling that wants communicating or expressing. Which is why I wrote," "No one draws a line for it’s own sake."
All communication depends upon analogy.
Tom,
You wrote a bunch of good stuff above, lots of insights. But some monkey wrenches were thrown into the mix as well. Possibly because you were writing hastily. With that in mind...
Analogy is just one kind of relation. It is relations upon which all understandings or tropes are based and built, thus all communications.
In words analogies are only useful insofar as the references called to mind map to each other. And the estrangement between the vehicle and tenor, that gap is essentially dismissed as a remainder of the division (though sometimes the creative choice of vehicle adds comedy, judgement, or poetic tone.)
In art, however, that estrangement gap must be visible (even if subtly so, among the apparent elements and their constituent abstract components), so it is always a part of the poetry and always results in an aesthetic effect. So the differences become as important as the similarities. Which is to say, the analogy and anti-analogy come bound together to produce a complex meaning. (In fact, in art, so much information is manifested simultaneously with each stroke of the brush on canvas that multiple analogies/anti-analogy sets arise with each and every mark. It all gets very complex very quickly.)
In that light, I would also point out that it is not lines alone that create the relations of all the parts of the picture. Every abstract quality is a potential relation, including location. Thus, also, relations between abstractions are not nearly only confined to the geometric.
It's difficult to talk about Booth online, because his work is murdered by monitor downsampling.
Downsampling algorithms are designed to exaggerate contrast, so the places that lines meet in the sky stick out like a sore thumb at small sizes. Optically looking at a high quality print of Booth's work, the artifacts disappear. The photons from the lines scatter, and his image melds into a vibrating gray. In short, a retina has higher resolution than an Apple Retina.
Zoomed in, his effect also falls apart. But zooming in on a line in a representational drawing is like judging the quality of a Mozart symphony by a French Horn part played in isolation: "In two whole bars this French horn only played a single note! Mozart lacks Freedom and imagination! Serial music is superior, look how Schoenberg's French Horn plays all 12 tones consecutively!"
Remmie's values are certainly more evocative, but Booth wasn't going for evocative values here, and he's shown elsewhere he can handle dark moods quite competently. This composition was all about a punchy sunny image, which is something I don't believe Rembrandt ever pulled off.
Very interesting, Richard. Thanks.
Question: does the more abstract or "affected" approach of Booth (objectively) result in a feeling of less realism compared to Rembrandt, or is it just the lack of sophistication in the viewer that creates that subjective response? Rembrandt's stuff is notoriously muddy, vague, suggestive -- also an "affect", I guess, but most would say his work here was more "realistic". Amateurs like me can't figure out from where or how the response is derived, only where it arrives.
Like trompe l'oil, you've noted the physiology of the perception as part of the effect, which is quite helpful, but only experts seem to be able to make this analysis. Kind of frustrating for the rest of us trying to understand why and when art is superior or inferior (which perhaps isn't really the question, but nevertheless is raised).
I'd say your examples of Booth's work are "Rembrandty" in subject matter..
It was the handling of values, light and shadow, and chiaroscuro that prompted those links for comparison.
How Rembrandt used hundreds of micro-thin etching lines to create that roiling cloud mass is just as interesting to me as how Booth uses his line groups to creates the feeling of radiating light, swooshing wind, or turbulent air.
he was willing to tolerate the imprecision and unavoidable breaks in the lines drawn by hand. If that was his trade off, it was a wise one. But for me, that still means the breaks were a byproduct of the anatomy of the wrist.
Again, Booth could hand-draw quite long and unbroken line-groupings.
It seems clear in the examples you've posted that Booth is purposely creating subtle line breaks to form barely-distinguishable patches in the sky which subtly suggest backgrounded cloud masses without changing value. As well as creating movement effects in the sky to suggest wind and turbulence etc, as mentioned previously.
Richard: "But zooming in on a line in a representational drawing is like judging the quality of a Mozart symphony by a French Horn part played in isolation"
I've made that same point 10798 times.
David is trying to neuro-link his like of modernist abstraction / abstract expressionism with the close up brush marks of the earlier commercial illustrators.
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